The present invention will be described herein in connection with a pulse oximetry apparatus and a method, which are used to measure blood oxygen saturation in a subject, such as, for example, a human patient. The teachings of the present invention can be used in other applications wherein useable signal information is obtained in a noisy environment.
In an exemplary pulse oximetry apparatus and a corresponding method, blood oxygen saturation is determined by transmitting pulses of electromagnetic energy through a portion of a subject which has blood flowing therein (e.g., through a finger, through an ear lobe, or other portion of the body where blood flows close to the skin). In the examples described herein, the pulses of electromagnetic energy comprise periodic pulses of red light having wavelengths of approximately 660 nanometers, for example, and periodic pulses of infrared light having wavelengths of approximately 905 nanometers. As described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,482,036 and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,490,505 the pulses of red light and the pulses of infrared light are applied with the same periodicity but in an alternating and non-overlapping manner. In particular, in preferred embodiments, the red pulses are active for approximately 25% of each cycle and the infrared pulses are also active for approximately 25% of each cycle. The red pulses are separated in time from the infrared pulses such that both pulses are inactive for approximately 25% of each cycle between a red pulse and the next infrared pulse and both pulses are inactive for approximately 25% of each cycle between an infrared pulse and the next red pulse. (Although described herein below in connection with pulses having 25% duty cycles, it should be understood by persons of skill in the art that the duty cycles of the pulses can be changed in some applications.) After propagating through the portion of the subject, the red pulses and the infrared pulses are detected by a detector which is responsive to light at both wavelengths and which generates an electrical signal which has a predictable relationship to the intensity of the electromagnetic energy incident on the detector. The electrical signal is processed in accordance with the present invention to provide a representation of the blood oxygen saturation of the subject. In conventional time division multiplexing (TDM) demodulation that uses rectangular waves to drive the red and infrared LEDs, the conventional process of demodulation using square waves can result in the aliasing of the ambient noise components that come close to the sidebands of harmonics and the fundamental frequency of the rectangular waves, and the noise components are thus collapsed into the output signal generated by the demodulation. In particular, it is very difficult to avoid including harmonics of the line frequency in the demodulated output signal.
In conventional time division multiplexing (TDM) demodulation that uses rectangular waves to drive the red and infrared LEDs, the conventional process of demodulation using square waves can result in the aliasing of the ambient noise components that come close to the sidebands of harmonics and the fundamental frequency of the rectangular waves, and the noise components are thus collapsed into the output signal generated by the demodulation. In particular, it is very difficult to avoid including harmonics of the line frequency in the demodulated output signal.